Watched two cat-themed ONA's today.
First up,
Catman (S1: 6/10, S2: 6/10, S3: 7/10): This is the most depressing and hilarious epic you will ever see. To set the scene, its a city/world of anthropomorphized cats. Our protagonist, Catman, is quite possibly the biggest dick of them all. He's constantly drunk, giving the finger to gangsta (and gangster) cats and moaning about his complete and utter failure in his love-life. Each episode is around 3 - 6 minutes, devoted to different activities that Catman does and the attitude he gives to them. Initially his devil-may-care attitude is somewhat charming and amusing, but it eventually turns to self-loathing. Which is also fun.
The animation is basically flash. It's pretty and does the job, but some movements are a bit awkward. The backgrounds are photos of places and have possibly been edited to suit the situation (i.e. putting cats in place of humans). The sound effects do the job, but notably, there is no vocalised speech. Cats don't speak, so I don't know why these should either. To make up for the lack of speech, though, is music by a band called "The Planet Smashers" who are, after wiki'ing them, a Canadian ska band. It's The Madness, but a bit less annoying and suits the show on some level.
I enjoyed watching Catman, overall. There were a couple of dud episodes, but it doesn't matter when they are so short. He lives in an interesting world, where gangsters force people to buy cheese and everyone can do a decent amount of parkour and it has humour through it all, even though you are laughing
at Catman rather than with him.
Next is
Dark Side Cat (7/10). This is much shorter, six episodes of around 5 minutes each. This cat is also a prick and is visually much more like a normal flash cartoon than Catman. Very stylized and interesting though. Even though Dark Side Cat is set in our world, and the majority of cats featured are... you know, cats, Dark Side Cat himself is a bit bigger. He's like The Batman of cats. (
Picture.) Dark Side Cat is something of an interesting character as well, the beginnings of one anyway. He has some sort of moral-code so although he is mostly a complete and utter dick to all humans, he does care about them, or some of them, kids, I think. The arc running through the series is that the city is over-run with stray cats and there was a ban against them and Dark Side Cat doesn't like that very much and wants to sort it out. He wants respect. Or something.
Musically, there's one theme song that runs throughout. It's the one-minute opener to the show, but it also starts playing whenever Dark Side Cat does something - like moves. I enjoyed it, like the show itself, it's short, snappy and pretty damn fun.
Er... morally ambiguous cats FTW.
When things come along and "borrow" from you, though, it's not entirely unreasonable to want to distance yourself from them, especially when they fall massively out of public favor as the Matrix franchise did.
